Andrew M Brown is the Telegraph's obituaries editor.

It's all very well medicating children, but where do you stop?

Once you start treating children's behaviour with pills, it's hard to know when to stop (Photo: Getty)

The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is the standard reference work used in the United States for diagnosing mental illness. Here in Europe many psychiatrists prefer the International Classification of Diseases or ICD. But the DSM is still influential. So it matters to us in Britain that when it publishes its revised guidelines in DSM-5 in May 2013 it is expected gently to shepherd more troubled children in the direction of the prescription pad.

DSM-5 will almost certainly enlarge the diagnostic criteria for conditions such as social anxiety disorder, so that more patients will "qualify" for medical treatment for a range of mental disorders. This is probably why, as we report today, Kate Fallon, a psychologist, told the TUC Congress of her worries about "quick fix", drug-based remedies for simple childhood problems such as unhappiness and shyness – states of being which, surely, are part of normal childhood.

The thing is, this is how we deal with the behaviour of the young now — with medicines. I heard recently of a leading primary school which insists that children with behavioural problems take medication. The trouble is, once you start treating children with drugs, where do you stop? Inevitably you rely on the drugs to change the mood and behaviour, and you stop searching for other solutions. The child himself is also learning that pills are the easy way to change mood, calm down or whatever it is. And a ratchet effect operates, so dosage has to go up, stronger medicines are needed, on and on.

Of course, some drugs are worse than others, more dangerous, more "addictive" or more toxic. But we should always resist the temptation of thinking that our drugs today are far safer than the old-fashioned heavy-duty potions of the past. Miracle treatments have a long history of proving to be much less safe than was first thought. In the 1970s, nervous children might have been prescribed benzodiazepines, the Valium group. At the time "benzos" were considered a sort of wonder drug, good for anything from period pains to insomnia. Some of these young people never came off the drugs, certainly not without great discomfort and lasting damage to their peace of mind. Their nerves are permanently jangled. I've come across people who've been on shockingly high doses of these drugs for years and their lives have been seriously damaged as a result.

No one could say that the drugs being used on children now, the stimulants, for example, are "milder" than those benzodiazepines. They're just different. Equally, no one can be sure what the effect on the brain is of taking them all through childhood and on into adulthood. It is an experiment, and children are the guinea pigs.